For Audible, I developed and produced Psychedelic Frequency – a 10-episode expansion of the universe established in Maejor Frequency. This narrative audio series takes the listeners on an inward journey into the darkened corners of the unconscious mind illuminated by psychedelics and coaxed into waking reality through the sublime and subtle energies of music. In 2024, AdWeek magazine named Psychedelic Frequency the year’s Best Pop Culture Podcast.
After the success of the first series, I was asked to reimagine the show in its second iteration and to do deep research into the quickly evolving world of psychedelic therapies. In the resulting expansion, we hear from a multiplicity of voices – prominent musicians, groundbreaking psychedelic researchers, psychonauts, therapy patients, and spiritual seekers.
To ground the series in the latest science, I reached out to Natalie Lyla Ginsberg from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. She had appeared as a guest and guide in a Maejor Frequency episode that centered on a transformative Ayahuasca journey, and now she would join Maejor as co-host.
Psychedelic Frequency explores the entire taxonomy of the psychedelic experience, from the importance of set and setting to ego death, and how we synthesize these experiences to change the default setting within our minds. To do this, we hear from some of the world’s most prominent researchers into psychedelic therapies: Rick Doblin and Marcela Ot’Alora of MAPS, Robin Carhart-Harris, and Dr. Julie Holland.
In order to carry forward earlier themes of sound frequencies and healing into this series, I traveled to Berlin to speak with Hans Cousto, the originator of the Cosmic Octave, a method for translating Kepler’s idea of the “Music of the Spheres” into the audible range of human hearing.
As a psychonaut himself, Cousto had done this with the frequencies of various psychedelics; each episode of Psychedelic Frequency was then tuned to the specific wavelength of various substances: Ketamine, DMT, Psilocybin. Ten in all.
Carl Jung sketched a rough map of the collective unconscious, an archetypal realm unbound by the laws of waking reality. The psychedelic researcher and therapist Stanislav Grof then expanded upon this cartography after observing and facilitating more than 4,000 LSD therapy sessions.
This map became a guide that shaped the arc of the series, which roughly follows the format of a single psychedelic therapy session – from preparation to ingestion to integration.
In these three episodes, we tip from this world into the something beyond:
Episode II: Set and Setting
In Rio De Janeiro, Maejor embarks on psychedelic journey that goes dangerously awry, underscoring the importance of set and setting. This concept, set and setting, coined by Timothy Leary, undergirds the nature of any psychedelic experience. It has ancient and unexpected roots in indigenous cultures and antiquity. Brian C. Muraresku, author of “The Immortality Key,” believes that ancient Greeks and early Christians both used a substance similar to LSD in their rituals and this may have lead to the creation of Western Civilization and Christianity.
Episode III: The Inner Healer
For this episode, we arranged for the series co-host, Natalie Lyla Ginsburg, to undergo a inter-muscular ketamine therapy session on tape. As she drifts into the world of being and feeling, we reveal the ways that psychedelic therapy can work and enumerate at taxonomy of highness, as conceived of by the rogue psychedelic chemist, Alexander Shulgin.
Episode IV: Holotropic Breathwork
We traveled to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur to undergo a breathwork session. Esalen which mirrors the history of the psychedelic therapy movement. Many of its leading guides passed through Esalen, including psychedelic therapy pioneer Dr. Stan Grof, who created the concept of holotropic breathwork as a means to enter into a psychedelic state without the need for psychotropic drugs. The episode ends with the listener via Natalie and Maejor being lead through a holotropic session.